Kabbalah clearly goes back to the ancient Middle East: pre-Babylonian; pre-Ur of the Chaldees.

How I myself longed for a visit to Ur of the Chaldees - what decadence they must have had in their idolatrous blossom.

Indeed, the overwhelming question that the Catholic Church had to confront in the last century - and which it wrestled with at the Second Vatican Council - is whether the church itself has now become an Ur of the Chaldees in the modern world.